Miraculous (poem)

Miraculous

Tarzan is anxious

In the bedroom, carpeting and air conditioning

are dominant smells, the odor of adhesive and its cool tempering

and the way the cigarette smoke of all her friends

Blends into a suburban climb to the high and dry

He was at his best, filled with animalistic impulse

to save the fallen overboard

Now it isn’t war, and all miracles are merchandise

and Jane grows blander, slyer

She has decided a wig would be easier than her hair

She comes home with boxes, round striped

as though inside he’d find a birthday cake

But she perches the contents on plastic heads

Names them Valerie, Louise, and Shirley

primps them, tells them things she means for him

“Val, don’t marry, what a worry, everything depends on the ladder…

The corporate one, darling, and he won’t move up. Lou, he talks about

what he calls his character. Ask me, Shirl, he’s one all right,

someone must have invented him…”

After their Saturday movie, their second Hitchcock

A parable of the allies he so misses

rising in despise

They should, he tells himself. Go! I should, be gone, fly far, from this alien

thicket, and Jane tucks her blonde tresses

under a short and curly look, dark, inspired

by Suzanne Pleshette

Her name, she says, is Margot

She tans, she asks him why he can’t buy some strapping

and fix that chair, bake brown beside his mate

“Those lines, on you…” Giggles, sips, can barely finish. “Give character. So

distinguished.

Me, I need my miracle creams, and still! These freckles! By the way

why not have that cutie pie pair

for highballs and hot dogs…?”

Coyly puckers her mouth aside, “But maybe they’re chaste and don’t”

“Don’t?”

“Tarz, don’t you want a little spark?”

Miraculous

The Travelers

(2022, Stephanie Foster)